


The Sacrifices We Make for One Another

by hollow_echos



Category: Leverage
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-13
Updated: 2016-12-13
Packaged: 2018-09-08 08:31:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,582
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8837668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollow_echos/pseuds/hollow_echos
Summary: Some cons don't go the way they should. Some jobs go sideways and a member  of their team gets caught. This time it's Eliot in the hands of people that mean him harm. It's on Parker to get him back.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ultra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ultra/gifts).



> Written as part of the 2016 Leverage Exchange. Happy holidays Ultra!

_“Don’t come after me,”_ Eliot’s level voice spoke in her ear.

 

The voice was that of a sentenced man, accepting his fate, hardening his voice.

 

_“I’ll be ok.”_ He was trying to sound confident. To the others, through their ear buds, they might believe it. They might be grasping to that tiny thread of hope like a lifeline.

 

His reassurances may have given her teammates some measure of comfort. Between his words, Parker heard something else that brought her cause for concern. He was hurt; she heard the faintest of winces between the words. She had helped him wrap up busted ribs after enough cons to see what that steady confidence looked like when the façade slipped, to be able to recognize that hitch in his voice.

 

Her hand tightened on the steering wheel. The thief was already in her head calculating the fastest route to get to where Eliot’s part of the con was playing out.

 

_“I mean it, don’t come after me. I don’t want to see you hurt. These guys aren’t the typical brand of evil we deal with, they’re bad news.”_

 

The first statement had been addressed to the entire crew.

 

In that second statement statement, Parker knew he was speaking directly to her. Eliot knew she didn’t see the world as others did. Where others saw insurmountable obstacles, her eyes were already tracing out the cracks in the brickwork that give her the handholds to scale her way over that wall.

 

She had already shifted the car into drive, all she had to do was move her foot mere inches from the brake to the accelerator, and she’d be on her way toward where she needed to be, to where Eliot needed her in that moment.

 

Through her ear bud, she heard the painful squeal of rusted iron against iron, a door to some dark corner where Eliot thought he might’ve been able to successfully hide in his injured state.

 

_“Over here! I found him!”_

She heard the thud that only came from a fist striking another human. She heard Eliot’s pained gasp as the breath got knocked out of him. A hiss of static as someone found his ear bud, a sickening crunch as someone crushed it under their heel. Then silence.

 

~*~

 

She wasn’t supposed to do this, this going off on her own. Most of the time, she followed the plan, even if she didn’t necessarily see how all the pieces fit together from her vantage point. She could have faith that the others could see the bigger picture, could see the way out of the woods and be the guiding voice in her ear that shepherded her toward that salvation.

 

But that premise, and that hard-earned faith in the team was rooted in their ability to work together. They were certainly more capable as a team – their skills and strengths fitting together in such a way that had allowed them to accomplish cons that would’ve crashed and burned had she attempted them alone.

 

Except a critical person had been been ripped out away from his rightful place in their team, was now lying in some dark room bleeding out or was tied to a chair getting beaten for information.

 

It’s amazing how the perfect balance can fall to ruin when you remove a single piece.

 

The meeting Nate had called to formulate a rescue plan had slid into chaos, had become a cacophony of competing voices all trying to speak louder than the rest and explain the merits of their plan while poking holes in the ideas of the others.

 

She’d picked up enough from each person’s statements to recognize what wouldn’t work. Nate wanted a multi-step ruse that would take days. She didn’t want to say it, but in her head, she knew on that timeframe, it would probably be a body retrieval instead of a live rescue.

 

Hardison and Sophie’s plans had to many things that had to go off without a hitch in order for it to work. Things always went sideways, and they didn’t have the luxury to take the time to run a critical eye over every aspect of the plan and find all the things that could possibly go wrong. They didn’t have time to put the contingency plans in place to cover each one of the permutations that might result. They didn’t have their hitter to help pull them out of the sloppy, often dangerous, situations that they failed to predict despite all that careful planning.

 

Sometimes you didn’t have the time to orchestrate the perfect con. Sometimes the way out as their enemies herded them toward capture was an ugly race to the finish – to beat down the goons that cropped up around each corner (if you were a hitter) or leap off a roof and pray for your rope to draw taut before your body shattered on the ground below (if you were a thief).

 

Sometimes the best extraction plan was the most instinctual, Parker knew this in the core of her person. She didn’t need to yell it louder than the rest over the other voices in the room.

 

Sometimes you followed the path of least resistance, and sometimes that way was around, not wading through the center. While the others continued debating, it was no trouble at all to slide out the kitchen window and into the night.

 

~*~

This part of her operation was perhaps the part that Parker liked least. This was the sort of role to which Sophie was better suited. Sophie could wear a string of pearls and a skin-tight dress like armor as she rode into battle.

 

But in this get-up, Parker felt exposed. If it weren’t for the knife strapped to one leg high enough on her thigh to be hidden by the high hemline of her dress, she’d feel naked indeed.

 

Under normal circumstances, the compound where Eliot was being held was locked down tighter than most military installations. But tonight wasn’t most nights; the red carpet had been rolled out for a gala intended to impress potential investors their enemies hoped to lure into backing their schemes.

 

The women may have worn similar get-ups for this role, had either Sophie or Parker been cast, but their paths would’ve diverged as they chose how to gain entry to a party to which they were most certainly not invited. Where Sophie was all confidence and grift, Parker’s methods relied on a quiet competence, on passing under the radar.

 

Skimming a party invite out of the pocket of a party attendee who had paused before outside the entrance to smoke a cigarette had been child’s play.

 

The hired muscle at the gate was the first element of this operation to put her on high alert. He may have dressed to look less intimidating. To the casual party goier, it could appear that he was simply part of the hired help meant to check invites and welcome people to the party, but Eliot’s lessons had taught her different.

 

She eyed the way his stance settled into a posture one learned only from years in the military. She noticed the way that the sleeves on his tuxedo jacket were stretched taut across his muscles. Eliot had taught her to know potential a threat when she saw one.

 

It didn’t change the fact that she had to stroll up to his podium and hand over her invite, but it did change the way she felt his eyes on her back as he waved her forward and onward into the party.

 

His weren’t the only eyes she felt on her in that room. She was beautiful by classic societal standards, and even though there was a time in her past where she would’ve chosen baggy shirts to hide the curves of her chest, Sophie had taught her that sometimes the safest place in the room was the center of attention.

 

A good thief kept to the shadows, but what one in their right mind would place themselves center stage? Those discordant premises – were what this method relied on. It was an illogical pairing, and so most people assumed it was an unlikely scenario. It meant that the people who were looking for intruders here would hopefully be on low alert in this setting.

 

So even if she could feel the men in that room raking her body with lustful gazes, she continued forward through the thick of the crowd with a confident set to her shoulder.

 

She knew it was different for Sophie; Sophie would be in her element just about now. But for her, this was an exercise in restraint. Parker had to remind herself not to reach for the knife in its sheath, even if it would give her some measure of comfort in this foreign territory. She had to maintain the quiet smile she’d forced her lips to take lest it fall way to the discomfort she actually felt.

 

She reminded herself that those people were too far away to see the goose bumps on her flesh, to hear the pounding of her heart against her ribs. This part wasn’t easy, but for Eliot, to get him back from these people, she’d make it happen.

 

She could do this. Parker steadied her nerves. She needed to project an aura of casual aloofness. She was a piece of meat that had voluntarily wandered into a den of lions, and her survival here relied on her ability to convince them she’s the delicacy they’d never have.

 

~*~

 

She’d found the poorly lit alcove and the door there that led to the restricted part of the compound. A keycard she’d lifted off a security guard making his rounds granted her the escape she sought. As the door shut behind her she was back to a more comfortable terrain away from the noise and the heat that so many bodies generated in close quarters.

 

She retrieved her gear bag from the undercarriage of a truck on the loading dock. She’d clipped it there as the driver idled outside the security checkpoint while his identity and cargo were verified. A knife she could conceal on her person easily enough, but a bag full of rope and harnesses and clothing she could move in more comfortably were a little harder to sneak in.

 

For all her hard work to get that gear in, a lot of it didn’t see much use in the end. She had arrived at the base of the wall that led up to the top floor where she expected Eliot was being held. Except there was no ledge far above to get the teeth of her grappling hook into. Without a place to anchor in, the rope and harnesses were useless. So she pulled those out of her bag and abandoned them under a bush. Every ounce of extra weight she carried on the climb needed a defined purpose, anything else was dead weight and the climb would be gruesome enough as it was. Rendered useless, she discarded her climbing gear. That accomplished, she approached the base of the wall, trying to find the area least covered in ivy to start her ascent.

 

She wasn’t supposed to climb without a rope and a harness and a spotter. It was a task she had done enough times before to be comfortable with the premise, but the one time Eliot had caught her doing it he had been furious. He ribbed her often enough for her eccentricities, called her twenty pounds of crazy in a five pound bag. But that sort of heckling was just part of the way they bantered back and forth, it was the sort of small moments their relationship was forged upon.

 

But this was the first time he had called her reckless with a heat in his voice, had asked her what it would do the team if she fell and they – if _he_ – were left to scrape her off the pavement. He’d dragged a promise out of her to never do it again (although at the time she hadn’t known whether she intended to keep that promise). Words were easy enough to let roll off the tongue, she’d been lied to enough in life to know that words were a cheap currency traded with little forethought or honest intention.

 

But Eliot hadn’t given her the opportunity to back-out of that agreement. In the cons that followed in the years since, he’d become a quiet fixture in the parts of various cons that required her climbing skills. He was the one who checked her harness, who kept tension on her ropes as she scaled the sides of buildings.

 

As she tightened the straps of her gear bag on her shoulder and reached for the first handhold on the coarse brick, she noticed the sudden ache of his absence. He wouldn’t like hearing about this part of the operation (and maybe she would omit that part of the story if she could), but if it meant having him there in that role again, it was a small price to pay.

 

~*~

 

There was blood on her hands.

 

Her hands were her livelihood and she’d turned them into red raw things on that climb. The ivy had hidden just how rough that stone was cut, and by the time she was halfway up and bleeding enough to know it was a mistake, it made no sense to turn back. Whether she climbed up to where Eliot was being held, or descended back the ground and found another way up, it was the same distance and same amount of abuse she’d put her body through. Might as well make it count for something.

 

So she’d gritted her teeth and winced each time she reached for a new handhold and a bit of sharp rock carved one more shallow cut in her hands, but she’d completed her climb all the same.

 

Perhaps there was some sense of balance in the world, though. For what misery the climb had posed, the part that followed had been easy enough. She’d hauled herself up over the balcony to find it empty. At this upper story on the building, apparently some guard had lapsed in his duty and assumed that they were insulated from intruders by the distance from the ground. Out of negligence or assumed safety, they’d left the latch on the glass door unlocked, allowing her to slip inside without a sound.

 

~*~

 

Stealth was good for many things, but it only got you so far.

 

Hardison had taught her that. In a single con his tasks could range between internet hacking so clean that no international intelligence agency would find a trace, to rigging up an explosion that would draw the attention of every law enforcement official and firefighter in a fifty-mile radius. There was a time and a space for stealth, but sometimes a more incendiary approach was warranted.

 

As she pressed the last of her plastic explosives to the steel door, she prayed to whatever deity might be listening that Eliot was far enough back from the door that he’d be insulated from the blast.

 

She’d have to rely on the intelligence, building schematics, and knowledge of this organization’s operations that her teammates had obtained. That information suggested that the cells where they kept people were set back a ways from the door.

 

She eyed the positioning of the explosives one last time, her gaze catching just for a moment on the bloody fingerprints she’d left on the door. It was sloppy work, the sort of forensic evidence that could be used to connect the dots back to her. But this door was also about to be rendered a pile of ash, so she didn’t take the time to wipe this evidence of her presence away.

 

She stepped back around the corner away from the door and pressed her body up against the wall. She shut her eyes to shield them from the blast, depressed the remote trigger, and counted the silent beats in her head until the fuse lit, the ground shook, and the pressure wave and heat and sheer force of the concussive blast washed past her body.

 

~*~

 

The world was completely silent. That close to the blast, there was no way to protect her hearing. She knew from experience that the silence would morph into a shrill buzz or a whining noise as her senses recovered from the shock and remembered how to function. Once upon a time, that deafness would have left her frozen and hiding in some corner until she could hear again. Before then, her hearing had been a sense that she hadn’t realized how much she relied on until it was taken away.

 

Being a thief meant working under sub-optimal conditions. Sometimes that meant working down a sensory input or two. With her hearing blunted, she made sure to keep her head on a swivel as she ducked through the hole where the door had once stood. Slight bits of broken brickwork and plaster floated through the layered her black outfit in a layer of gray dust.

 

A row of cells lay blessedly far back in the room, far enough away to have escaped the concussive force of the blast. As her eyes raked down the row all the cells were empty until her gaze caught on the last one where a form lay on the ground, back turned toward her.

 

Please let him be alive. They didn’t keep bodies in cells, did they? One didn’t have to worry about locking up a corpse to keep it from wandering off. It was a prayer she said to herself.

 

Parker crossed the room with quick steps, practiced footwork weaving an effortless path around the debris her intrusion had brought. Her eyes were glued to the figure inside as she operated her lock picks with instinct and muscle memory that could feel each tumbler give way as she continued her ministrations.

 

The silence had faded some, had given way to the familiar buzz in her ears as her ears started to recover. It still wasn’t enough to hear words, or distinguish particular sounds, though. So even as she uttered Eliot’s name, she didn’t expect to hear a response. But she had hoped to rouse the form to action, to see some sign of life.

 

But the person (body? Is it still a person if they’re maybe dead?) hadn’t moved, or maybe it had. Maybe a shallow breath had raised his chest just bare millimeters. Or maybe she had deluded herself into believing it had moved.

 

She opened the cell door as the lock gave way.

 

She rolled the form onto it’s back. His eyes were half lidded, wandering around half focused. But alive. He was alive. The skills Eliot had drilled into her took over as she completed a quick survey of his body looking for injuries. They’d taken his shirt, there were cigarette burns on his shoulder, a nasty bruise started under the left eye and extended down across his cheekbone. The area was swollen enough that maybe the underlying bone was cracked, but it was secondary concern for the moment. She didn’t find any serious injuries that would make her hesitant to move him. The thief took some small measure of comfort in that.

 

His gaze still hadn’t focused on hers yet, whether it was exhaustion or drugs or his body fatigued from whatever torture his captors had put Eliot through, he still wasn’t responding. So she balled her hand into a fist and rubbed it against his sternum, hoping that the pain would awaken him when none of her other attempts had.

 

His body arched, a hand shot up and clamped down around her wrist like a vice. The hitter’s wandering gaze narrowed into the dangerous glare of a wounded predator preparing to fight.

 

She suppressed a wince as he twisted her wrist into a martial arts lock that she knew would break the bones beneath if she moved the wrong way or if Eliot decided to apply more force.

 

“Eliot, it’s ok. It’s me, Parker. You’re ok, we’re gonna get out of here. But you need to let go of my wrist, and we need to leave before whoever is coming to investigate that blast gets here.”

 

His calloused hand twitched, tensed, as if he was warring over whether to relinquish his hold. She waited patiently for his mind to wrap around the words, and paid silent thanks as the sudden pressure around her wrist disappeared.

 

Eliot slowly rolled over onto his side and climbed to his knees as he gained his bearings. She pulled a bottle of water from her bag and held it out for him. From experience, she knew torture wasn’t always physical. Sometimes it was a denial of basic human needs – food, water, human companionship, maybe even light to see by. She’d known few worse things than a long night in a cold basement in total darkness wondering if the dawn would bring her rescue or her death.

 

He took the bottle from her outstretched hands, uncapping it quickly and downing half of it in one go. The rapid motion sent twinges of pain sparking up from her hands, but seeing a bit of alertness in Eliot’s eyes, seeing some of the color return to his pallored face, was worth it.

 

Her hearing had returned enough for her to hear the crunch of crumbled rock beneath someone’s boot behind her. It was enough warning to let her know they were in trouble. It was not enough warning to evade the hand that looped around her ponytail and jerked her backwards off balance.

 

“Here I was thinking I was gonna be left with a disappointing night, left to guard this abandoned corner of this place while the rest of my buddies are off playing security at the party. Eating the food and rubbing shoulders with rich folks and pretty women. Glad someone was kind enough to send a bit of that fun my direction.

 

He had drawn her upwards with his grip on her hair until she was standing on her toes. She tried to turn her head around to assess this new threat, but he quickly snapped her head back to face the other direction.

 

“None of that. I don’t need you getting any ideas. Wouldn’t want you to get hurt before I found some way for you to make this night a bit more fun, since I got left out of the other festivities.”

 

She heard Eliot’s low growl. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him tensing. Whatever goon had control of her head and her gaze obviously hadn’t paid Eliot enough attention to see that he wasn’t as injured and incapacitated as he might’ve expected.

 

Her neck was torqued at a harsh angle as Eliot barreled into the man and knocked him to the ground. Hair still tightly in the guard’s grip, she went to the floor with him, her body tangling amongst his limbs.

 

As Eliot’s fist connected with the man’s gut, the guard dropped his grip on her hair to defend himself from the hitter’s onslaught. She shuffled backwards as the two started to grapple in earnest.

 

The man clearly had some training, probably not up to Eliot’s par, but then Eliot was injured and that brought the odds closer to even. The two continued to exchange blows as she reached for knife in its sheath and advanced forward. Using a motion that she’d practiced enough in training sessions with Eliot to know she was doing it right, she sunk the blade into the meat of the man’s thigh.

 

It was a good place to target if you didn’t want a person chasing after you. Eliot had drilled that into her too.

 

The man howled in pain, all thoughts of attacking or defending himself abandoned, as that white lance of pain became the sole focus of his entire world.

 

Eliot rocked back a few steps, breathing hard. His eyes darted between their enemy and her a few times. Apparently satisfied that she was relatively unhurt and the man relatively incapacitated, his curled fists dropped to open palms at his sides. Raising one to brush the hair out of his eyes, he nodded in approval at her work as the two locked eyes.

 

She nodded in turn. They’d taken down this threat, but there’d be many more not too far behind. It was time to make a hasty escape. They made for where the door had once stood. She paused there for just a second, looking back at the guard on the floor.

 

The man on the floor stared daggers at her. Let him, his metaphysical rage was far less potent than the steel blade she’d sunk into him. One of his hands was on the handle of the knife as if he meant to pull it out, maybe in hopes that it would lessen the pain.

 

The old part of her, the part of her psyche from before she joined the team bubbled up. It was the part of her that knew life and death were a mere hair’s breath apart sometimes. It was such a tenuous division – the two domains pushed so close up against one another that a person who deserved to be alive could be rendered dead the next. And a person who deserved to die could keep on living, staring down at the corpse of a good person.

 

This man’s death would mean one less person in the world to do evil things. It wouldn’t leave her lying awake at night. She’d feel little guilt to know that she’d had a hand in his death. That part of her whispered to let him pull the knife, it was the only thing that would keep him from bleeding out if she’d placed it in the right place, close enough to the major blood vessel in his leg.

 

She could see Eliot watching her as these thoughts flitted through her head. It was a curious, maybe calculating gaze. Was he having the same thought? Could he make the connection and know what she was thinking?

 

All she had to do was turn her back and walk away. Let the man pull the knife if he wanted and bring about his own death. It wouldn’t be on her.

 

She saw Eliot’s brow furrow, his lips dipping into a disapproving frown. Maybe she didn’t have such a great poker face after all.

 

She sighed. There were parts of her old life she’d given up when she joined this team. Certain moral lines that her teammates had drawn in the sand as the parameters she needed to follow if she was going to be one of the good guys. They didn’t kill, not when it could be avoided. Apparently not even when a person deserved it. She’d made a number of promises to her teammates, some she didn’t know that she could keep, but this was one she knew they wouldn’t forgive her breaking.

 

“If you pull that knife, you’re dead before your buddies get here. My suggestion would be to leave it right where it’s at,” she muttered.

 

Eliot’s frown faded into a neutral expression, for the moment he was apparently satisfied that she’d done the right thing. She didn’t always understand why it was better to leave bad people in the world to hurt more people. She didn’t always agree with that that part of her team’s code of ethics, but she’d agreed to stay on the morally acceptable side of a particular line in the sand. For the sake of her team and the faith they had in her and the love she had for them, she acted accordingly, even when it felt wrong.

 

Without waiting around long enough to see if the man heeded her advice, she ducked around the corner and fell into step beside Eliot with the hopes of finding a route out of this compound and toward home.

 

~*~

 

It was a cold night. Cold enough to see her exhalations form as mist in the air. As a person who ran cold most of the time, she should’ve either retreated inside or bundled up more before coming out here.

 

But pausing long enough to find a blanket to drag up onto the roof with her, or forgoing the idea all together to stay in the blessed warmth of the indoors, would have meant rubbing shoulders with her teammates.

 

When they’d gotten back to their rented flat and base of operations for this con, she’d paused just long enough to see that Eliot was in good hands. Sophie had procured real food for him from somewhere and Hardison was pushing Eliot into a chair beside the table where he’d set out the first aid kit. The hitter wasn’t in awful shape (he’d certainly come out of cons in worse shape before), but he could certainly use a bit of attention in his current state.

 

Knowing they’d push her down into a chair next to him if they saw the state of her torn-up hands, she’d stuck them in the pockets of her pants and breezed toward the back room as soon as she was satisfied that Eliot was being taken care of.

 

She felt Nate’s gaze on her. Their mastermind had stood at the counter supervising their ministrations with half of his attention while his eyes traced her movements through the room. The man’s expression betrayed little of his mood, but she knew there were conversations to be had. Lectures to expect on why it wasn’t appropriate to go off on her own like that without backup. An accounting of all the reasons her actions had jeopardized their plan, how her lone-wolf actions had been an unwarranted risk that exposed the team or herself to danger.

 

She knew that was part of the price she’d pay for her actions. But to get Eliot back, she’d been willing to pay that and far more.

 

She didn’t expect to escape those conversations; she didn’t mind that she’d have to sit through them.

 

But the adrenalin was wearing off, what had been a dull ache in her hands during the con was growing into something more bothersome. Every muscle in her body was sore from the grueling climb she’d made and the mental exhaustion of the full night’s exertions were catching up to her.

 

She’d have those conversations, but not tonight. So even though the chill was sinking into her bones, she leaned up against the chimney and gazed out over the city.

 

Out there, millions of people were going about their lives – sleeping or waking, alone or in the company of others. Their paths diverging and intersecting in the most unpredictable of ways. She heard the howl of the wind through a nearby alleyway and the more distant barking of a dog and some driver honking their horn in protest.

 

The seeming chaos morphed into something else entirely if you listened long enough. It was an orchestral arrangement - perhaps unstructured in nature, but the individual notes coming together organically all the same. Feeling the quiet thrum of the city at night had always been a comfort to her.

 

She heard the door open behind her, but she didn’t turn. There weren’t many people it could be. Hardison and Sophie knew enough to respect her privacy when she retreated out here, and probably took enough relief from Eliot’s safe return that they would hold their questions for her until morning.

 

Nate would eventually pull her aside for a debriefing and a conversation, but perhaps he took enough satisfaction in her success. Even if he disapproved of her methods, he couldn’t take issue with the outcome – they’d gotten their hitter back. Perhaps that victory against long odds have Nate holding off a bit on his line of questions too.

 

Eliot sat down beside her, wincing as he lowered himself to the ground. “Do we really need to be out here sitting on the ground? Seems to me there are more comfortable options available.”

 

She turned to look at him and raised an eyebrow. “I like it out here, no one’s making you come out here if you don’t want to be. You should be inside resting, recovering, as you like to sternly and rather forcefully recommend when it’s one of us on the mend.”

 

He switched on the lantern he’d brought up with him along with a few other items that were on his other side and too far in the shadows for her to make out what they were.

 

“Your hands,” he prompted, nodding down at where she had them pulled back into her sleeves to keep them warm.

 

“What of them?”

 

“Let’s see what damage you’ve done to them.”

 

“They’re fine,” she huffed.

 

“They’re kind of important for the sorts of activities you like to get up to, and I’ll be the judge of that.”

 

“Eliot, come on. I-“

 

He shook his head, cutting her off. “They were raw from what I saw of them in the few moments of down time we had as we escaped. I may not have had much time to look you over for injuries, but it was enough to get an idea of what state they’re in. And I saw enough to know they need tending.” He held his hand out for hers, waiting patiently.

 

She sighed, but he was stubborn and relentless when it came to any of them being hurt. He wasn’t going to let it go, and she was too tired to argue.

 

She pushed back her sleeves, exposing her hands and holding them out for him to inspect. He had already laid out a clean towel in his lap for a work surface, apparently confident that he’d win this argument.

 

He rolled a pair of medical gloves onto his hands before he started handling hers. He pulled her hands up his improvised work surface; close enough to the light for him to make a cursory inspection.

 

As he twisted them this way and that to inspect from different angles, he was frowning.

 

Her hands were curled into half-fists, curved into a ‘U’ shape. She made no effort to open them further, the blood had dried once they’d stopped moving, and even flexing her grip modestly made them hurt all the more. The first time she’d tried that just to see how bad they were, the movement had reopen a few of the wounds to start bleeding again. So she’d settled for just letting them be, eventually they’d have to be dealt with like everything else, but while she could put off dealing with that, she would.

 

Eliot wasn’t going to stand for the same approach. “You should’ve gotten this tended to earlier. It’s going to hurt more when I have to lay these out flat to doctor them.”

 

“Hardison was focusing on you, and you needed it more than I do. You were held captive. You were beaten and burned. I think that takes priority when it comes to triage.”

 

The hitter had opened a sterile gauze dressing and dipped it into the bowl of water he had brought up with him. He held her wrist in his free hand. He knew this was going to hurt but it had to be done. He didn’t want her jerking back, which was going to be the instinctual response.

 

She hissed and went to retreat. He tightened his grip just enough to hold her hand steady as he worked. “Easy.”

 

“That’s easy for you to say,” she snapped back. It hurt and she was tired and sore.

 

He paused for a moment, giving her a brief reprieve from the painful work of cleaning out the wounds. “You want something for the pain?”

 

“You know that I don’t,” she responded. You didn’t dull your senses, not in the sorts of roles she and Eliot both took on. They put you at an unacceptable disadvantage.

 

He was rolling a vial between his fingers. “It’s just a local anesthetic, it’ll numb up your hands but not make your mind go fuzzy.”

 

“I don’t like drugs.”

 

“And I don’t like seeing you in pain. Come on Parker, please? It’ll make this easier for both of us. This is going to take awhile – you have dust, debris, and god knows what else in these cuts. You don’t want them getting infected. Which means I need to clean them out. I’ll probably have to stitch up at least a handful of them, and get them bandaged.”

 

“I don’t want-“

 

“You did this for me,” Eliot retorted, cutting her off and nodding at her hands. “I shouldn’t have gotten caught. I shouldn’t have needed rescuing. But I did get caught, and I wasn’t getting out without help. I know that given the state that I was in. You did this to get me out,” he said, motioning to her injured hands. “Now let me do this for you. Please?”

 

The normally reserved hitter was letting emotion bleed into his voice that she wasn’t used to hearing there. If her hands were raw, it was clear he was dealing with a rawness of his own. Shame at his capture? Disappointment and frustration that it had led to her getting hurt? She wasn’t the best at reading emotions, but enough time with her teammates had given her enough practice that Parker was at least letting her do better on that front.

 

She didn’t want the drugs. She’d rather sit through the pain of the next however long it took to get her hands cleaned up than put a foreign substance into her body designed to dull the senses, even if Eliot had picked one out that would minimize the effect.

 

But she’d been the one captured before. And Eliot had been the one to bust her out. He’d given her space when she’d needed time alone to process that experience, and been there waiting patiently to help patch up whatever pieces had chipped off in the maelstrom.

 

What he’d been through already was probably enough trauma for one stint. She didn’t need her stubbornness to add gasoline onto whatever fire of emotions was already running through his head.

 

“Fine. Go ahead I guess,” she assented.

 

He drew medication from the vial up into a syringe and injected its contents into one hand. Repeating the sequence, he did the other too. It burned going in, but didn’t register as much compared to the abuse her hands had already taken that night. Releasing the second hand, he let it rest on the towel.

 

He sat back a bit, nodding in approval. “We’ll give that a few minutes to kick in. Let me know when they start feeling numb? Keep them on the towel, though. We don’t need them picking up any more dirt from this roof.”

 

She would’ve preferred to draw them back up into her lap, but she did as instructed, leaving them in place. “You ok?” she asked.

 

“I will be. Certainly better than if I had stayed where I was in the company of some people I may have given ample reason to dislike me.”

 

“How’s the cheek and the burns?” she queried.

 

“Cheek’s just swollen, I think, nothing broken. And the person they put up to make me sing the answers to their every question could learn a thing or five from the other folks who’ve tried their hand at me before.”

 

The conversation lapsed into silence for a few moments before the hitter spoke again. “Nate’s pretty mad at you, you know?”

 

Parker shrugged. “Not like we haven’t done this song and dance before. He’ll tell me that we do things as a team, that we aren’t lone operatives anymore. I’ll sit there and listen, I owe him that much. But I wouldn’t change what I did. It got you out,” she asserted.

 

“I know, and I’m grateful for that part. Just thought I’d give you the heads up so you see that conversation coming.”

 

She chuckled just a bit. “I know. Most of the time the team method works, but you and I both are independent enough that we sometimes wander off on our own.”

 

“It’s not the safest way to do things,” he warned.

 

“But sometimes it’s the most effective. Don’t say you wouldn’t have done the same thing were situations reversed.”

 

“Fair enough. How’s the hand? Can you feel this?” he asked, taking a piece of gauze and running it lightly across her palm.

 

She shook her head. “No, I don’t feel that.”

 

“You’re probably numbed up enough that I can start. That ok?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“This shouldn’t hurt. If it does, you need to say something and I’ll put a bit more of that numbing agent into it.”

 

“I’m sure it’s fine.”

 

He scowled. “You’ll tell me if this is hurting, ok? No arguments. There’s no reason for you to sit here in pain while I do this if there’s a way to make it not hurt.”

 

He’d been patient with her stubbornness, but there was a line where his resolve hardened. This was apparently it. There was a firmness in his voice that let her know he was serious on this.

 

“Ok. I’ll let you know if it hurts.”

 

Apparently satisfied, he picked up a pair of tweezers and started picking bits of debris free of the wounds. “I’m pretty good on the details of what happened from the time you blew the door off where they were holding me up until the part where we made it back here. You want to fill me in on what happened during the part of that rescue before you met up with me?”

 

So she’d started from the beginning and walked him through her various activities in the earlier parts of her night. This was going to take awhile and they might as well talk about something to kill the time.

 

At a certain point, even though he was focusing the bulk of his attention mostly on suturing one of the particularly deep cuts in her hand, he noticed that she was shivering a bit. Parker had tried to still the motion, to avoid interfering with his work, but the body was a fickle thing at times and did what it wanted regardless of her intent.

 

He paused. “You’re cold.” It wasn’t a question. “You want to go inside and finish this up there?”

 

She shrugged. “You think the other guys are still up? I’m kinda more in the mood to answer all their questions in the morning.”

 

“Sophie probably wandered off to bed. I think Hardison was a bit keyed up after the stress of this con. It seemed like the kind of night that he was going to burn off some of that excess energy raiding with his buddies on whatever online game has his current interest.”

 

“So he’s probably still up,” she muttered more to herself than to anyone else.

 

“Probably,” Eliot agreed.

 

“Then let’s stay out here.”

 

He didn’t argue, although he shrugged off his jacket. Before she could protest, he’d draped it across her shoulders.

 

“You don’t have to-“

 

“I’m wearing a long sleeve shirt and a hoodie. You have on something I know you like to call a jacket but that is really too pitifully thin to count toward keeping you warm. You tolerate cold weather about as well as a sheep sheared of its wool and dropped into an artic environment, which is to say not well at all. You’re cold and tired and having to sit here through however long it takes me to get your hands bandaged. I think it makes sense for you to take the jacket. That or we move inside and finish this up there, those are the options for how I see them.”

 

She scowled, but let the matter drop.

 

“So you were telling me about how you found your way into the secure wing of the compound?” he prompted her.

 

She picked back up with her recounting of her escapades. She tried to talk her way around the part where she scaled the wall without a harness or rope, but while Eliot had listened to the rest of her story mostly without interrupting, this was the part where he started probing a bit for more information. Asking questions about how she’d gotten the injury under the pretense that it would help him know what sort of risk she may have for certain bugs that could maybe sprout up as infections if they’d gotten into the wound. He had said it was to let him know what bugs he should be watching out for as he kept an eye on how her hands healed in the coming days.

 

She argued back that they all looked pretty much the same if it was going to happen – inflamed and red and hot and tender. And weren’t they doing all this thorough work right now to avoid that eventuality? It was a fair argument, but it didn’t stop the line of questions. Eliot was like a bloodhound on a scent when there was information he wanted.

 

And when he eventually backed the conversation into a corner where she had to explain the exact nature of the climb, sans safety equipment, he’d been suitably upset. She’d known he would be.

 

Eliot seemed to be willing to take wanton risks when it was him sticking his neck out to save one of them. But somehow when the situations were reversed, he was far less tolerant of the idea.

 

She’d made that argument before, but there was a protective streak in Eliot that wouldn’t be placated, even if his split approach was a double standard. So she swallowed the words before they came out of her mouth and sat patiently as he reiterated all the reasons you never climb without suitable safety precautions.

 

Halfway through that spiel maybe he noticed that she was leaning more heavily against the chimney, or that her earlier rapt attention to his ministrations had waned to a casual interest. Most of her efforts had shifted just to staying awake.

 

As he taped in place the last bandage on her second hand, he placed it down gently on the towel between them. She used the back of that hand to rub at her eyes with a yawn.

 

“I think that’s it,” the hitter offered.

 

“Thanks for patching them up,” she dropped both hands to her lap, flexing them slightly to test how much the bandages would impede her dexterity as they healed.

 

“Let them rest, don’t be undoing all my hard work. They need to heal,” he admonished her softly.

 

“I was just checking out your good work.”

 

“As you just said, it’s good work I did. They’ll be fine. Assuming you let them rest and heal. I know you like to put them through their paces pretty regularly, but you’ll have to find some other way to occupy your time for awhile here.”

 

She groaned inwardly. She wasn’t looking forward to that. She was always fidgety when she was taken off the active team roster while some injury healed. “Guess you’ll just have to entertain me. I think I’ll be in good company in my boredom while you’re healing up too.” That at least put a smile on her face.

 

She’d raised badgering Eliot in jest to an art form.

 

If her face was all smiles at that thought, Eliot’s expression moved in the opposite direction as he thought through what he’d be in for. Perhaps it was just now that he was doing the mental math of realizing they’d both be off duty, cooped up for awhile in one another’s company.

 

“No rearranging my carefully organized kitchen at the office when we get home. The kitchen is my domain, you don’t even cook. The most you do is wander through when you want me to sample something delicious smelling that I’m making. And I’d have to point out that when you put my kitchen out of order in a way that leaves me playing a game of hide-and-seek to find what you’ve hidden, it’s your stomach that sits growling until I find what I need.”

 

A mischievous grin crossed her face. “Sometimes the entertainment is worth waiting that much longer.”

 

He didn’t really know what to say to that. So he turned his attention to packing up his first aid supplies for a moment as he gathered his thoughts.

 

“No braiding my hair,” he muttered, breaking the silence.

 

“Ok,” she said. She could tell the way she agreed without even a bit of retort put him off balance a bit. Sometimes it was all about keeping him guessing what came next. Unpredictability was part of the perfect con.

 

“No pink bows either. I think I scared Hardison enough to delete all the copies of the photos he took the last time you did that, but I also wouldn’t put it past him to have hidden a copy of said photos in a place I won’t find them,” he swallowed. “No bows.”

 

“I agreed to no braids, don’t you know you only get one request? The rest is fair game.”

 

He pondered that for a moment. “Then expect to find something nutritious sneaking it’s way into your food in the coming weeks. I know vegetables are the devil and whoever invented vitamins deserves to rot in hell as far as you are concerned, but I’m most certainly cooking since you most definitely aren’t.”

 

“I can cook some foods,” she shot back.

 

“You started a kitchen fire the last time you ‘cooked,’ which might I remind us both included putting a metal bowl in the microwave.”

 

“I never knew it would explode like that-“

 

“And that’s exactly why you aren’t cooking. Not that microwaving up leftovers even counts as cooking.”

 

“It totally does”

 

“Like I was saying,” he continued, “a healing body needs adequate nutrition, not the sugar and caffeine you like to survive off of.”

 

“I’ve gotten good at picking out when you try to disguise some of that gross stuff you call food and sneak it into a dish,” she shot back.

 

“Well, we’ll just have to see then, won’t we?” he responded, posing the challenge.

 

So the matchup was tentatively set, a game of wills to see whether it would first come to pass that Eliot’s hair ended up in pigtails with bows or Parker would unwittingly consume some food that she’d sworn off. Perhaps the next few weeks off wouldn’t be so awful after all, she thought to herself.

 

They were corporeal beings. Parker reflected on this fact as they gathered up the last of their things to head inside.

 

Both hitter and thief laid their bodies on the line to be a positive force of change in the world. Sometimes that pendulum swung the other way and their bodies or psyches bore the brunt of that onslaught.

 

Eliot extended a hand to help pull her up to her feet, careful to support her arm instead of grabbing for her injured hand.

 

They both knew the risks of their work, especially given their roles on the team. They had also decided it was worth it, even at the times that they were asked to pay that price, as they had this time. But they’d go on to heal.

 

He held open the door for her, the warmth beckoning her forward. Together, they’d be alright

 

~*~

 

 

 


End file.
